The Samaritan's secret

Jibril puffed out his cheeks. “What does that mean?” he said, slowly.

“I hoped you might have an idea.” Omar Yussef watched the priest run a hand through his short beard and shake his head. “Roween said you argued with Ishaq over something immediately before his death. What was the argument about?”

“It’s not appropriate for me to say bad things about my son after his death.”

“Why does the argument reflect badly on Ishaq?”

“To curse his father is a shameful thing.”

“He cursed you? Why?”

The priest moved toward the window. He yanked on the chord, pulling the blind open. Omar Yussef blinked in the strong light.

“I told him to divorce Roween,” Jibril said.

“Were they unhappy?”

“I wanted a grandson.”

“Ishaq was your only son. But you told me you have two daughters. Are they childless?”

The priest shook his head. “You Arabs have a saying: ‘The son of a son is dear. The son of a daughter is a stranger.’ The male line is most important. You understand that.”

“I understand that this is what convention dictates, Your Honor, but I can’t agree with you,” he said.

“Easy for you to say,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You only have sons.”

Omar Yussef looked with irritation at his friend. He turned back to the priest. “You argued with Ishaq. Did he refuse to end his marriage?”

“He refused.” Jibril leaned his face on the windowpane, squinting into the sunlight.

“Because he loved Roween?” Omar Yussef stepped toward Jibril in the corner. “Or because he knew a change of wife wouldn’t make him any more likely to father a child?”

The priest straightened quickly to his full six feet and raised his chin. He glared at Omar Yussef.

“You know what I mean, don’t you?” Omar Yussef said.

Jibril slackened his fingers and let the blind rattle down. In the sudden darkness, the priest’s voice was raw and dry. “Roween is a very plain girl. If Ishaq had a more beautiful wife, he might not have become a Louti, a sodomite,” he said.

“How harshly did you criticize him?” Omar Yussef moved close to the priest. He smelled raw onion on the man’s breath. “Did you tell him you hated what he was? Did he blame you for his unhappiness? For making him live on this lonely hilltop with a wife to whom he could never be a real husband?”

“I’m a priest of our people.” Jibril’s voice was quiet. “I’m a symbol. My family must be above reproach.”

“So you made him return from Paris. Don’t you think he might have been happy there? In the liberal West, he might have found love.”

“What kind of love? A filthy, sinful love.”

“You made him pay a fine to rejoin the community. You made him come back to this remote, conservative place, where he would be isolated. Where he would fall under the spell of the only other cosmopolitan character around.”

“What’re you talking about? Whom?”

“Amin Kanaan.”

“What does this have to do with Kanaan? Ishaq did some work for him, that’s all.”

Khamis Zeydan snorted. “Hard work for you or I, maybe. But quite to Ishaq’s taste, it seems.”

The priest shook his head, his misty eyes rolling.

“If it were Roween’s fault that they had no children, everyone would expect Ishaq to divorce her. But he refused to end the marriage. No divorce and no kids: people in the village would have realized Roween wasn’t the cause of the childlessness.” Omar Yussef raised his voice. “Did Ishaq tell you about his secret life? Did you kill him because of that? Because of the scandal there would be if people found out that the priest’s son was gay, that he was having an affair with a powerful businessman?”

Jibril’s slender shoulders shook. “It wasn’t that way,” he said. “I loved him.” His words became a moan and his legs gave way. He slipped down the wall onto his haunches and crouched with his hand on his forehead. His other hand gathered the skirts of his robe and twisted them.

Chapter 27

The lonely teenager bounced his basketball somewhere behind Roween’s house. Omar Yussef leaned on the police jeep. Khamis Zeydan limped to his side. “You seem to be leaving some tearful scenes behind you today.”

“These have been painful conversations,” Omar Yussef said. “My head’s killing me.” He stretched across the front of the jeep and dropped his forehead to the hood. The metal was hot in the early afternoon sunshine. By the time the sun rises this high tomorrow, I must have my hands on those account details, or I won’t be the only Palestinian with a headache, he thought.

He looked up at the sun. “Even people driven to suicidal despair are clearminded enough to climb to the fourth story before they end it all,” he said. “I feel like I’m throwing myself again and again from a ground-floor window. I get hurt, but I can’t make it count.”

“I’ve always warned you that a detective needs to be hard,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You have to be able to manipulate people, to make them like you, hate you, fear you. But you should be dispassionate. Don’t feel what they feel.”

“How can I fail to feel the anguish of Liana and this priest?” Omar Yussef inclined his head toward the house with the pink window frames. “That’d be inhuman.”

“Murder is inhuman.” The police chief picked a strand of tobacco off his lip. “You need to feel the inhumanity, so that you can walk beside the murderer and read his mind.”

Omar Yussef shook his head. “You’re forgetting that passion and love might figure in it. I prefer to enter the head of the killer by feeling those emotions, rather than hate and violence.”

The boy with the basketball loped around a corner. When he saw Omar Yussef, he halted with the ball at his ear and his feet wide apart in the middle of the road.

Omar Yussef approached him and beckoned. The boy didn’t move. Omar Yussef sweated as he shuffled along the empty street. From the corner of his eye, he caught another movement in the curtain behind Roween’s window.

“Clever boy,” he said, “where is the house of the man who looks after the visitor center on top of the mountain?”

The boy stared and rolled his eyes.

“A fat man.” Omar Yussef held his hands far in front of his belly, puffed out his cheeks and waddled from side to side. The boy sucked in his chin and wagged his head. He’s laughing, Omar Yussef thought. “A fat man who wears a cap with the name of his cigarettes on it.”

The boy moved along the street, the ball tucked beneath his arm. Khamis Zeydan limped up beside Omar Yussef. “If you’re intending to shoot some baskets with this kid, I warn you my leg’s in no state for me to jump,” he said.

“I imagine you’d offset your handicap by playing dirty,” Omar Yussef said.

The boy came to an alley between two squat apartment blocks and pointed into the darkness.

“Thank you, clever boy,” Omar Yussef said.

The boy headed toward the park, tossing the ball awkwardly in the air and jerking forward at the waist to catch it, his arms sagging each time as though it were a tremendous weight.

Omar Yussef moved into the dark alley. The breeze cooled him now that he was out of the sun. Behind one of the apartment blocks, a lurid green awning flapped lightly over a yard filled with junk. Against the bare cinderblock wall of a shed, the frame of an old Japanese motorbike leaned, stripped of its parts like desert carrion, the springs cutting through its dusty seat. A blackened oil drum, punctured to ventilate a fire during colder months, stood beside an upended ceramic sink and a mattress rotten with mold. In a worn leather armchair, the caretaker who